"The internet must have limitations and it must not be available to everyone," Alferov stated in a recent interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. He went on to explain that in his opinion the total lack of control and restrictions of the net can affect people's behavior and damage publicly-accepted moral guidelines.

"By making fools of our population today we will have a lot of problems," he said.

In the same interview, Alferov said he personally did not expect any conflicts between humanity and artificial intelligence in future, but stated that it was wrong to "fully trust a machine."

Alferov is a world-renowned physicist, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also a State Duma MP representing the largest opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).

But... Who will I argue with if there aren't any commies on the Internet?

I've had this same discussion about voting rights, and reproduction rights too. I think there are lots people who should be restricted from doing either.But, for such a system to exist, someone else gets to decide who gets to vote or who gets to reproduce.

So despite my sense that there are people who shouldn't vote or reproduce or access the internet for that matter... I favor no restrictions in all cases, because giving someone else the power to decide who is eligible is inevitably a worse solution.

It's similar to the Chinese philosophy on social order... and don't fool yourself, "the message" is shaped in so called free Western societies as well. The fact that it's getting harder to control the shaping of the message is scary, for everyone.

He is not wrong. A lot of people cannot handle what they find on the internet.

What exactly do you mean by "cannot handle"?

If you're referring to all the nonsense "information" that's out there, I'll just point out that propaganda and disinformation and just flat being wrong aren't anything new in human history, and just because that's happening on computers and smartphones doesn't make it fundamentally different from when it came from the mouths of would-be leaders ranting in the town square.

If you're saying they get shocked and triggered by some of the images or words, then I'll just say that if you don't want to view goatse or similar kinds of things, then don't. And again, this isn't anything new: Smut has been available in all kinds of forms for as long as humans have had leisure time available to them.

It's the easy and anonymous availability that makes it worse than the town square.If you went to the library and asked for books about the proper way to commit suicide, went to the town square to find a jihadist to explain to you why killing infidels is the answer to your shitty life, or had to go across town and hide behind a four-inch tree to stalk your ex, you would hit roadblocks to help you think about your actions. You could still do each of those things, the same way that you can hurt people with a Swiss army knife, but the internet is like a loaded weapon: if you're not capable of handling it (how it can feed your demons), the best we all hope for is that you only injure yourself.

And Tide pods, clearly. Because the internet rewards dangerous and stupid with fame, on a scale that makes trash TV jealous.

It's the easy and anonymous availability that makes it worse than the town square.

Right. That's why, before the Internet came about, purveyors of complete nonsense were before the advent of the Internet completely unable to start religious [scientology.org] cults [wikipedia.org], terrorist [wikipedia.org] groups [wikipedia.org], and popular [wikipedia.org] conspiracy [wikipedia.org] theories [wikipedia.org]. Often relying on anonymity and pseudonyms to do so.

Doing bad things would be more difficult if doing things were more difficult. This is a valid reasoning, mind you, BUT it is not applied to other systems. Transportation, old style Communication, Automation, and to the deadliest and faster weapon on earth, money.

You know why?Because some people control money. And they don't control the internet much. yet.The whole fake news movement is about this. Internet was a godsend for control, once accepted it is being closing down. No surprise.

Besides, you can shut down anything by polluting it first and then claiming it must not be permitted for the common good.

A lot of people should probably not be running around loose in the world.But the burden of babysitting them is approximately the same as picking them up and dusting them off, or shoveling them under when they do themselves in. And nobody likes to be told what to do.

We could start by restricting him. It's not that access to information can harm peoples morals, or their mental health, that's absolute brain-rot. It's that having people of low morals and suspect mental health, combined with said brain rot, on the internet is bad for the internet.

It's not particularly good for the rotten brains either I guess, but they're done either way, swinehood having no remedy.

I guess what I'm trying to say is 'forget about protecting normies from the internet, it's the internet that needs to be protected from the normies.'

--"Grasp the essence, seize the root."

Re:Being right for the wrong reasons. (Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday February 13 2018, @02:08AM

I'm not so sure. I've known some bright, basically decent people who retired and got into killing ime watching way too much Youtube. To the point where they were totally taken in by Trump, and are still eating up the shock-jocks and propaganda machines.

The filter bubble can do horrible things to a person, with too much time on your hands there just ain't no bottom to that rabbit hole.

Re:Being right for the wrong reasons. (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:30AM

Lenin's attempt at communism lead to cannibalism in 1921-22 due to redistribution of crops, Stalin helped achieve that milestone in 1932-33, and Mao doubled down in 1959-61. Pol Pot dabbled in it off and on from 1963-81. In Venezuelan prisons cannibalism has been occurring. Some of the people who have managed to escape from North Korea have recounted their horror at the practice occurring in times of famine because of government control of the food supply.

While cannibalism has arisen at other times in human history, there is no form of government that appears to make it a policy through purposeful attempts at government control of the food supply.

--"I'd rather take a political risk for peace rather than risk peace in pursuit of politics" - President Donald J. Trump

A person living in a strong society with good education and a sense of self-worth and what they consider a meaningful life is not going to be phased by what they find on the internet.

He's advocating for hiding the truth of what it means to be human because he believes people are to fragile to understand. Possibly his ideas of what it is to be human cannot withstand the truth. And it displeases him.

Re:meaning and truth(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday February 17 2018, @04:17PM

Taken at face value, no. What is expressed there as a whole though is the _most_ human truth you will ever find. You cannot deny it, you cannot shout it down, you cannot pretend it doesn't exist. Humans made this and they populated it with information, mostly uncensored until recently.

Note that he is not alone in proposing that. China is already shaping the Internet big time. Yes, a strong person, intelligent and independent, will not care about calls to $somethingBad. But the truth is that many (or some) people are too fragile to understand. Our way of handling this is to give everyone the full potential to raise themselves or to sink themselves and become homeless drunkards in the extreme case. These fragile people bought tulips, south seas shares, and now bitcoins. We do not try to save them from themselves - in part because someone will be saving us one day against our wishes. Free people (or believing to be relatively free) refuse such control. We want to make our own mistakes. But at the same time we (except the nearest friends, if they know) allow fragile people to incur catastrophic losses. This is the morale of free people.

But this is not the only moral system in the world, as the axioms of Euclid are not the only set of axioms, and we are not constrained to a plane. Alferov & communists, including Chinese, use a different set of axioms. They do not postulate personal freedom, but they postulate universal happiness (so to say.) To that end their system takes control over personal freedoms in order to flatten the differences. It worked in USSR so well, that only few inventors would care to invent anything. This moral system is as valid as any other - it is just alien to us, as would be a social setup of a hive civilization, for example.

No it fucking isn't. That screed ignores human nature entirely. We *aren't* a hive civilization and trying to make us one will just result in mass death, as it has the last several times the hardcore Communists tried that.

Re:meaning and truth(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 14 2018, @04:36PM

I would postulate that all 1st world countries have a "strong society" and there are many "developing countries"/ 3rd World countries that also have "strong societies". I would call any society strong, if a significant portion of the local population truly believes in it's ideals. I'm guessing that's not what they were getting at though. I'm guessing they were going with something more along the lines of "For the Motherland!", all other forms of society are weak pathetic things in comparison.

Re:meaning and truth(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday February 17 2018, @04:25PM

A strong tradition and a mostly unified culture. A shared past. Long-standing traditions that support social stability. Common touchstones weaved throughout spiritual, historical, and day-to-day habits and activities. Common foods that have evolved over time with the culture. Of course a common written and spoken language.

You meet a person on the street and you know with some reasonable amount of certainty that you both share a common culture and are working towards common goals that extend beyond your lifetime.

If you hate these ideas. Maybe take 15 minutes out of your day to think about why exactly that is. Did you come to this decision yourself? Do you immediately imagine this common culture as opposed to your personal beliefs, or that you would be the outsider? Please consider why you believe this.

Many people are saying that Crooked Hillary was a Fake candidate. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. She could have asked for recounts. Who knows what would have happened? I think she would have lost badly, I don't know. Nobody knows. Because she didn't ask for ANY recounts. They're saying it's like she didn't want to win. Like she only ran to make sure that I would win. But I tell them no, she's a loser and a hater. Not because she wants to be. Because that's all she knows how to be. That's all she's ever been. And all she will ever be. She doesn't know anything different. Bill could have done much better.......come to think of it, he has!

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

No he didn't, you triggered dipfuck. He's never met Aristarchus. I would guess he came to that conclusion after years of exposure to what the filter bubble does to masses of people with weak self-concept and weak wills. He's wrong, and it should be obvious to anyone why he's wrong (hint: it's basically eugenics but for internet access rather than breeding rights...), but it's also understandable how he came to this conclusion.

few dozYou do realize that Aristarchus is older than fuck, and he's been around the world many hundreds of times. How the fuck would you know who Aristarchus has met, or hasn't met? You're such a presumptuous little twit. It's a safe bet that there are fewer people that Aristarchus has NEVER MET, than there are who he has met. And, unless he's raciss or something, I'll bet Aristarchus is willing to talk to Russians now and then.

Dipfuck? Are you working up the courage to ask me to dip my wick in that? I'll pass . . . you can borrow one of the goats though.

Liiiiike I said, the guy is his own worst enemy. The last couple replies from him have been hilarious, in a nasty, taking-glee-in-others'-misfortune sort of way. I hope he keeps it up, even though for his own sake, he ought to make like a broken web form and quit POSTing...

This is me not responding to Runaway. whom I have never met, by the way.

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

The Insidious Covert Rebuttal to the Oblivious Rebuttal is khallow, whom I now suspect is a S.A.L.T. Devious Commies! First they go after our precious bodily fluids, and then they pretend to go out of existence, at the same time inventing the Internets, Through their agent Al Bore, funded by Giorgio Sores, and drive all the good people of the West insane with an overabundance of information that is impossible to vet, analyze, or fact-check.

It results in the narrowing of cognitive functions, causing it's victims to think that just saying "obvious rebuttal" is enough to prevail in any dispute. Or it may cause persons with little education to believe that they know as much as anyone, not realizing they they lack the context, the background, the wisdom and discrimination to deal with all the information now available on the internets, much as has happened to our own poor, dear, asshole, Runaway1917.

How in the hell is this reasonable? What happened to "beware of him who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master?"

We cannot, absolutely cannot, let this come to pass, for the exact same reasons you don't want a poll tax or a eugenics initiative. It's precisely the same argument, just about access to a different resource.

What happened to "beware of him who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master?"

Last I checked, is still a quip in the Alpha Centauri, when you build the "Planetary Datalinks" secret project.A bit ironically, the full quote is

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

It's not like the game created some nonsensical phrase. A game designer came up with the quote. Quite possibly Brian Reynolds. "Reynolds researched science fiction for the game's writing.[42] His inspiration included "classic works of science fiction", including Frank Herbert's The Jesus Incident and Hellstrom's Hive, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for alien races; Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Slant by Greg Bear, and Stephen R. Donaldson's The Real Story for future technology and science; and Dune by Herbert and Bear's Anvil of Stars for negative interactions between humans.[47][48]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri [wikipedia.org]

Personally, I think it's quite a good quote. Knowledge is something that should be accessible to all.

Re:Who will I argue with...?Re:Who will I argue with...?(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:11AM
(3 children)

You say it like the communists are the only authoritarians on this planet!Watch closer, you'll discover some in your own "yard".(for some, even only a look into the mirror would suffice, if you know what I mean)